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Comment by ilovecomputers | Hacker News Reader

Where does mathematics come into play in your evaluation? I just spent last quarter on discrete mathematics and digital design and it has given me a different perspective on programming in my learning experience.

I wouldn't call myself a programmer yet ( Joe Hewitt has made that apparent to me: http://twitter.com/joehewitt/status/9813494038 ), but it seems like modern software engineering is a form of alchemy now. I thought a software product is a combination of different mathematical techniques, but translating that into code seems so cumbersome (taken into consideration that I've learned and had experience in my choice of programming language and framework, which is also a major task on its own).

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Math has always been a part of technical design. I think "programming" is starting to become a field where the actual authoring of code and the design of logic fuse completely. So the future of programming combines the design (engineering, mathematics, etc.) with writing code.

From my somewhat inexperienced standpoint, I think programming has gone from instructing the computer to complete a task, to telling the computer to create a logic and handle events based on a complex set of conditions. The former was simple - 1, 2, 3, done - while the latter requires you to design a system, then make that system function through code.

I see old-style programming as following a map: go straight, turn right, turn left, and then stop at the destination. Modern programming is more like telling the computer to use this logic to find its own way on the map, then follow through.

Basically, I see programming slowly morphing into the creation of artificial intelligence.

I think you have the wrong idea about programming. Programming has always had algorithms (the ability to find its way around a map). This "old-style programming" is called procedural programming, but even that paradigm had capabilities to implement algorithms. This is the computer science aspect of programming. Actually, it's not an aspect at all, it's the foundation of programming.

No, programming is a result of mixing math and linguistics to achieve information processing. Of course that's my inexperience evaluation and I bet a veteran of this field would quickly tell me that I too have an incorrect notion. But see, that's the thing. It shouldn't be this hard to comprehend! Sadly, as Scott Rosenberg says in his book Dreaming in Code, the reason why programming is imperfect is because people made it that way and people are imperfect.

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